technicalities

October 03, 2007

In an editorial in the January 1964 issue of If, the always-intelligent Theodore Sturgeon weighed in on the so-called conflict between science and religion. His essay is in large part an attack on the "God of the gaps" fallacy, committed in differing ways by religious conservatives and overzealous atheists alike. Atheism, of course, has a high profile these days, and with it the concept of science "replacing" religion. 43 years later, these thoughts remain insightful—another prescient example of how ahead of his time Sturgeon was.

Sturgeon tells of a radio show on which he appeared alongside other prominent writers and editors. One listener called in with a question: "Don't you think... that to create life in the laboratory is to usurp God?" Sturgeon's reply, in the pages of an editorial in If, was thus:

"Answer: No. Man's hands are God's work; the work of man's hands is God's work. (I spoke—and speak—for myself, of course.) So much for the question and the questioner, but I'm glad he brought it up and equally glad to do likewise here.

"The recurring suggestion that there's some sort of Armageddon going on between Science and Religion is, I think, a straw man for bigots. That Science has at one time or another dealt certain kinds of Religion a heavy blow, I do not argue. I do believe, however, that what received the blow was this or that set of fixed convictions, and not Religion itself. And I think that the idea that Science and Religion must of necessity be opposed to one another is a throwback at least to the 19th Century—perhaps farther—and that to engage in this battle any more is equivalent to, and as quaint as, re-fighting the War of the Roses.

"It seems to me that this Armageddon notion springs from a concept which is more than a little insulting to both camps. Reduced to its simplest terms, it reads: Knowledge is Finite. The rationale would seem to be this: that only God can know everything and do everything. That the more man knows, the closer he gets to knowing it all, the more his science does, the closer it gets to doing it all; and that the end product would be an omniscient and omnipotent man who would usurp the place of an omniscient and omnipotent God.

"Now, if science proves anything at all, it is that both knowledge and power potentials are infinite. The ultimate in either can never be reached. For those who care to believe it, God already has this knowledge and potency. How then can there possibly be a conflict in the matter?

"Furthermore, science has demonstrated time and again, and will always demonstrate, that the production of solutions is the richest source of new problems. This too seems to be an infinite process. As the size of our body of knowledge grows, so does the size of the as-yet-unknown. And ever shall. Many churchmen can take this calmly in stride, regarding it (in which I concur) as a living manifestation of the greatness of this infinite Cause.

"I know personally a good many scientists. Being people, they present a cross-section of convictions and attitudes quite as varied as those of any people. In the area of religion, I have met scientists far more devout than I could ever want to be. I've met unmoved, habitual, Sunday-best churchgoers, backslid Orthodoxers; agnostics, atheists, and people who just don't care one way or another.

"There is no secret sect of guys with test-tubes out to destroy the temples. There are more anti-religionists outside Science than in it... and if God things about this at all, He probably feels that He made a cosmos quite roomy enough to contain them all."

From "The Day They Threw God At Me" by Theodore Sturgeon. If, January 1964, p. 4-6.

August 23, 2007

For those who don't feel like reading a 2,500+ word post on the subject, here's an abbreviated version of my reaction to Mark Lilla's article "The Politics of God." This was sent as a letter to the New York Times Magazine's editor.

Mark Lilla's clear-cut distinction in "The Politics of God" between irrational Muslims and the rational West contributes to a narrative of intractable opposition that encourages conflict between the societies. This is colonialism—it depicts Muslims as savages who can't take care of themselves, and need either a paternalistic guiding hand or a violent iron fist to keep them under control. Lilla makes no straightforward statements in support of preemptive attacks on Muslim countries as do writers like Christopher Hitchens. Indeed, Lilla himself may be a pacifist-- he doesn't say. But his article adopts a colonialist attitude that can all-too-easily be spun into support for imperialist war. Meanwhile, Lilla turns a blind eye to the far-from-rational actions of Western nations (like, for instance, the neocolonial war we're currently involved in). I'm surprised to see the New York Times publishing an article with so archaic an attitude toward non-Western cultures; I'm even more surprised to see the ease with which otherwise liberal minds are being converted to this poisonous way of thinking.

Though this letter doesn't mention it, I just want to repeat my request that everyone in the entire world read (or listen to) William T. Cavanaugh's "Does Religion Cause Violence?", which is one of the best articles I've ever read in any publication and on any subject. (Really!)

August 20, 2007

A piece by Mark Lilla in yesterday's New York Times Magazine called "The Politics of God" lays out the case for the irreconcilable differences between the Islamic world and the West. Islamic societies and their inhabitants, Lilla argues, can't distinguish between politics and religion, and as a result the West can't communicate with them. Ours is a rational worldview, he argues, while theirs is irrational:

Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

The bulk of Lilla's article is a history of "political theology" in Europe and the United States, which I won't get into too much. Lilla's article is of particular interest primarily because it comes on the heels of a much better article in a much lower-profile publication that points out many of the flaws in the logic of arguments like Lilla's, and the ease with which those arguments can be brought to bear in justifying violence and bloodshed. That article was William T. Cavanaugh's "Does Religion Cause Violence?", which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. The article is not available on the HDB's website, though a slightly different version, delivered as a lecture at the University of Western Australia and the University of Melbourne last year, is available here (plus an audio recording here). It is without question the best response I've yet read to the prejudiced claim, stated in some circles as a basic principle that needs no empirical support, that religion and violence are inextricably linked.

Cavanaugh's argument begins by establishing that defining religion is a tricky thing—but those who contend that religion leads to violence generally gloss over their definitions rather than explore complexities that may weaken their argument:

the problem with the "religion and violence" arguments is not that their working definitions of religion are too fuzzy. The problem is precisely the opposite. Their implicit definitions of religion are unjustifiably clear about what does and does not qualify as a religion. Certain belief systems, like Islam, are condemned, while certain others, like nationalism, are arbitrarily ignored.

[...] Consider the case of the preeminent historian Martin Marty. In a book on public religion, Marty argues that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and therefore violent. When it comes to defining what "religion" means, however, Marty lists seventeen different definitions of religion, then begs off giving his own definition, since, he says, "[s]cholars will never agree on the definition of religion." Instead Marty gives a list of five "features" that mark a religion. He then proceeds to show how "politics" displays all five of the same features. [...] In offering five defining features of "religion," and shows how "politics" fits all five. He is trying to show how closely intertwined religion and politics are, but he ends up demolishing any theoretical basis for separating the two. Nevertheless, he continues on to warn of the dangers of religion, while ignoring the violent tendencies of supposedly "secular" politics.

Turning to another author, Cavanaugh finds that even those who accept some complications to their definition of religion can make the same sort of error:

In his book Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion, religious studies scholar Richard Wentz blames violence on absolutism. People create absolutes out of fear of their own limitations. Absolutes are projections of a fictional limited self, and people react with violence when others do not accept them. Religion has a peculiar tendency toward absolutism, says Wentz, but he casts a very wide net when considering religion. [...] Wentz should be commended for his consistency in not trying to erect an artificial division between "religious" and "secular" types of absolutism. The price of consistency, however, is that he evacuates his own argument of explanatory force or usefulness. The word "religion" in the title of his book—Why People do Bad Things in the Name of Religion—ends up meaning anything people do that gives their lives order and meaning. A more economical title for his book would have been Why People Do Bad Things. The term "religion" is so broad that it serves no useful analytical purpose.

Cavanaugh extrapolates from Wentz's use of "absolutism" as a defining motivator of violence, finding that "secular" motivations will generally beat out "religious" ones:

If a person claims to believe in the Christian God but never gets off the couch on Sunday morning and spends the rest of the week in obsessive pursuit of profit in the bond market, then what is "absolute" in that person's life in a functional sense is probably not the Christian God. Matthew 6:24 personifies Mammon as a rival god, not in the conviction that such a divine being really exists, but from the empirical observation that people have a tendency to treat all sorts of things as absolutes.

Suppose we apply an empirical test to the question of absolutism. "Absolute" is itself a vague term, but in the "religion and violence" arguments it appears to indicate the tendency to take something so seriously that violence results. The most relevant empirically testable definition of "absolute," then, would be "that for which one is willing to kill." This test has the advantage of covering behavior, and not simply what one claims to believe. Now let us ask the following two questions: What percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians would be willing to kill for their Christian faith? What percentage would be willing to kill for their country? Whether we attempt to answer these questions by survey or by observing American Christians' behavior in wartime, it seems clear that, at least among American Christians, the nation-state is subject to far more absolutist fervor than Christianity. For most American Christians, even public evangelization is considered to be in poor taste, and yet most endorse organized slaughter on behalf of the nation as sometimes necessary and often laudable.

The problem here—one of the only flaws I see in Cavanaugh's entire essay—is that the term "absolute" is essentially tautological: "That which causes people to commit violent acts is that for which people are willing to commit violent acts." Nevertheless, it's far more useful to have a tautological definition for what causes violence than to have a deliberately obfuscating one, so the use of "absolutism" is a much better start than attempting to create a distinction between "religious" and "secular" violence.

Having established the argument that religion causes violence is based on faulty or nonexistent definitions, Cavanaugh goes on to explore the hidden assumptions and necessary ends of the argument: by creating a category of bad, "religious" violence, the argument opens the door to excusing, condoning, and even encouraging "secular" violence.

The story is told repeatedly that the liberal state has learned to tame the dangerous divisiveness of contending religious beliefs by reducing them to essentially private affairs. In foreign policy, the conventional wisdom helps reinforce and justify Western attitudes and policies toward the non-Western world, especially Muslims, whose primary point of difference with the West is their stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere. "We in the West long ago learned the sobering lessons of religious warfare and have moved toward secularization. The liberal nation-state is essentially a peacemaker. Now we only seek to share the blessings of peace with the Muslim world. Regrettably, because of their stubborn fanaticism, it is sometimes necessary to bomb them into liberal democracy." In other words, the myth of religious violence establishes a reassuring dichotomy between their violence—which is absolutist, divisive, and irrational—and our violence, which is modest, unitive, and rational.

Cavanaugh argues that it's no coincidence that books like Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, and Mark Juergensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God are bestsellers at a time when the U.S. is at war in the Muslim world. Indeed, Harris has written in support of the use of torture in the War on Terror, and Hitchens is a vocal supporter of the Bush Doctrine. These authors' books serve to sell the ideals of imperialism and endless war to a left-wing audience that might otherwise be pacifistic. In boiling down the motivations of Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias to exclusively religious factors, these writers create a simplistic picture of global politics that fits well with the black-and-white worldview of the Bush White House. Regarding Mark Juergensmeyer, Cavanaugh writes:

The problem with Juergensmeyer's analysis is not just its sanitized account of colonial history, where America just happens to find itself associated with bad people. The problem is that history is subordinated to an essentialist account of "religion" in which the religious Others cannot seem to deal rationally with world events. They employ guilt by association. They have paranoid visions of globalization. They stereotype, and blame easy targets when their lives are disrupted by forces they do not understand. They blow simple oppositions up into cosmic proportions. Understanding Muslim hostility toward America therefore does not require careful scrutiny of America's historical dealings with the Muslim world. Rather, Juergensmeyer turns our attention to the tendency of such "religious" actors to misunderstand such historical events, to blow them out of proportion. Understanding Iranian Shiite militancy does not seem to require careful examination of U.S. support for overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and for the Shah's 26-year reign of terror that was to follow. Instead, Juergensmeyer puzzles over why "religious" actors project such mundane things as torture and coups and oil trading into factors in a cosmic war. Juergensmeyer's analysis is comforting for us in the West because it creates a blind spot regarding our own history of violence. It calls attention to anti-colonial violence, labeled "religious," and calls attention away from colonial violence, labeled "secular."

Mark Lilla's article in the New York Times Magazine makes no straightforward statements in support of preemptive wars in Muslim countries. Indeed, Lilla himself may be a pacifist—he doesn't say. But nevertheless, his article's clear-cut distinction between irrational Muslims and the rational West contributes to a narrative of intractable opposition that encourages conflict between the societies. This is colonialism—it depicts Muslims as savages who can't take care of themselves, and need either a paternalistic guiding hand or a violent iron fist to keep them under control. Lilla's closing paragraph sinks to the lowest depths of imperialistic pomposity:

We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible's messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

Ironically, the distinction between rational West and irrational Islam turns our current conflicts into a Holy War, an absolutist conflict between eternal foes—theocracy vs. democracy, sane reason vs. insane faith—instead of the petty, worldly struggle it really is. Lilla may not make this leap, but others are more than happy to. Cavanaugh closes his essay with a passage on Sam Harris' The End of Faith:

In a chapter entitled "The Problem with Islam," Harris writes: "In our dialogue with the Muslim world, we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us." This is especially a problem if such people gain access to nuclear weapons. "There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons... In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe." Muslims then would likely misinterpret this act of "self-defense" as a genocidal crusade, thus plunging the world into nuclear holocaust. "All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns."

In other words, if we have to slaughter millions through a nuclear first strike, it will be the fault of the Muslims and their crazy religious beliefs. Before we get to that point, Harris continues, we must encourage civil society in Islamic countries, but we cannot trust them to vote it in. "It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives."

Never mind that American support for dictators who were "better than the alternative" is precisely what led to the current situation in both Iraq and Iran. But I digress.

Harris' book is a particularly blunt version of this type of justification for neo-colonial intervention, but he is by no means isolated. His book is enthusiastically endorsed by such academic superstars as Alan Dershowitz, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer. Indeed, Harris's logic is little different in practice from the Bush Doctrine that America has access to liberal values that are "right and true for every person, in every society," that we must use our power to promote such values "on every continent," and that America will take preemptive military action if necessary to promote such values. Today the U.S. military is attempting, through the massive use of violence, to liberate Iraq from religious violence. It is an inherently contradictory effort, and its every failure will be attributed in part to the pernicious influence of religion and its tendency toward violence. If we really wish to understand its failure, however, we will need to question the very myth of religious violence on which such military adventures depend.

The specter of Harris's support for "benevolent dictators" hangs over Lilla's imperialistic closing statements. But this support for suppressing religious freedom, both at home and abroad, lurks underneath much religion-and-violence writing. By straining at the gnat of "religious violence," America in general (and the left in particular) is swallowing the camel of colonialism and even, in Harris's case, fascism. It's similar in many ways to the unintended consequences of the MacKinnon-Dworkin antipornography laws in Canada, which had support from a number of feminist leaders. Once the laws were enacted, the first to be prosecuted were owners of gay and lesbian bookstores. Anti-religious writers like those Cavanaugh critiques make a similar leap, allowing themselves to be co-opted into the greater evil of imperialism.

August 07, 2007

My copy of the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin got buried under a pile of papers, so it wasn't until a week or so ago that I read Sarah Coakley's excellent theological essay on "God and Evolution: A New Solution." Coakley calls into question the kinds of theology that the media-packaged "debate" over evolution assumes. Creationists, intelligent design theorists, and Darwinian atheists all have limited concepts of God, and the limits are largely inspired by an assumption of Deism. Coakley begins by setting up her theological starting point:

"Let me note up front that I am assuming a "classical" understanding of the Christian God—that is, a God who is Being itself, creator and sustainer of all that is, eternal (i.e., atemporal, omnipresent), omniscient, omnipotent, all loving, indeed the source of all perfection. One solution to the problems we confront since Darwin is to give up on one, or more, of these classical attributes for God; but for the meantime I will not entertain that systematic option—I suspect it results from a failure to think through the full logical implications of divine atemporality—even though it cannot, a priori, be ruled out."

To which I say: absolutely. To my mind, the eternalism of God is a "this changes everything" concept, with implications for every aspect of theology and ontology. The atheist idea of God is too small—it treats God, to borrow a phrase from later in the essay, as "a mere item, albeit 'big,' in the temporal universe itself." I think the Creationist idea of God makes the same sort of error, failing to fully consider the meaning of what creation means if time is not a line with a beginning and end. The definition of God as eternal requires creation to occur outside of time rather than at its beginning, and thus the creation of the universe and its moment-to-moment sustaining are the same thing. From this Coakley brings forth a Teilhardian concept of God (rather than chance) as the the driving force of evolution:

"First, then, it is vital to avoid, in the case of precultural evolution, the presumption that "God" competes with the evolutionary process as a (very big) bit player in the temporal unfolding of "natural selection." Once we are released from that false presumption, "God" is no longer—and idolatrously—construed as problematically interventionist (or feebly failing in such) along the same temporal plane as the process itself. Rather, God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or "randomness," yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself."

I've long thought the concept of "randomness" in evolutionary biology to be a little presumptuous—after all, physics points to determinism, not chance, as the universal standard, at least above the quantum level. In assuming randomness as a fundamentally unassailable aspect of reality, classical scientific atheism commits its own "God of the gaps" fallacy. Should the mechanism of this apparent randomness be uncovered, a major link in the stated atheist chain of reasoning from evolution to unbelief will be removed. Science, of course, is built on replacing old theories with new ones, but the perceived randomness of genetic mutation is the keystone of scientific atheism—a philosophical standpoint, not a scientific one. Without randomness, the logic of the atheist argument loses its internal consistency. Please don't take this to mean that I'm throwing in with ID theorists. The phrase "intelligent design" would be an excellent description of a robust system of thought like that of Teilhard de Chardin (or Sarah Coakley), but as it stands the term describes a mess of bad science and bad theology. My point is rather that the idea that both ID theorists and scientific atheists want to sell us—that God's existence can be either proved or disproved based solely on the evidence of biology—share a fatal flaw. Not only that, Coakley states that they both fail to live up to their own ideological standards:

"These thoughts, now briefly enunciated, help to illuminate why the particular range of options currently popularized in the news media in response to the evolution/God debate seem curiously inept alternatives. Dogmatic "scientific" atheism, first, constantly goes well beyond the empirical evidences of evolution itself, and can give no convincing account of its own pessimistic reductionism; it thus falls on its own methodological sword. Intelligent Design, or ID, in inverse contrast, tends to assume a God who only occasionally bestirs himself to action; even if this were not already unacceptable theistically, its 'solutions' prove deeply problematic and vulnerable scientifically as well."

A new idea is needed, and Coakley's essay plants the seeds for what may be a truly complete theological solution.

July 19, 2007

The title of Augustine's De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) is misleading by modern standards. This is not a "literalist" commentary as we would define it—rather than finding, like the group behind the recently-opened Creation Museum, "Answers in Genesis," Augustine finds questions. Lots and lots of questions. Where modern-day literalists see the creation narrative as a straightforward and unpuzzling account, Augustine is all too aware that the picture it paints of the system of the world is incomplete. He sees truth in it, but he's uncertain in what way the story reflects the truth. His method in this book is to pose a dozen questions, answer one or two of them, and then make clear that those answers may well be supplanted by future theological concepts or discoveries about the natural world. It's become an unquestioned assumption in recent decades that theology doesn't allow for the replacement of its hypotheses as does the scientific method, but Augustine shows that this simply isn't the case. His exegetical technique is remarkably similar to the scientific method—it's all about testing theories.

Perhaps the best-known part of this book is a passage about why the religious should defer to natural philosophers on questions of demonstrable fact. It's particularly germane to the science-religion "debate," but the translation most often quoted is not my favorite (and it's often unjustly truncated to boot). Here it is in Edmund Hill's version:

There is knowledge to be had, after all, about the earth, about the sky, about the other elements of this world, about the movements and revolutions or even the magnitude and distances of the constellations, about the predictable eclipses of moon and sun, about the cycles of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and everything else of this kind. And it frequently happens that even non-Christians will have knowledge of this sort in a way that they can substantiate with scientific arguments or experiments. Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one's guard against at all costs, that they should ever hear Christians spouting what they claim our Christian literature has to say on these topics, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be toto caelo, as the saying goes, wide of the mark. And what is so vexing is not that misguided people should be laughed at, as that our authors should be assumed by outsiders to have held such views and, to the great detriment of those about whose salvation we are so concerned, should be written off and consigned to the waste paper basket as so many ignoramuses.

Whenever, you see, they catch some members of the Christian community making mistakes on a subject which they know inside out, and defending their hollow opinions on the authority of our books, on what grounds are they going to trust those books on the resurrection of the dead and the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, when they suppose they include any number of mistakes and fallacies on matters which they themselves have been able to master either by experiment or by the surest of calculations? It is impossible to say what trouble and grief such rash, self-assured know-alls cause the more cautious and experienced brothers and sisters. Whenever they find themselves challenged and taken to task for some shaky and false theory of theirs by people who do not recognize the authority of our books, they try to defend what they have aired with the most frivolous temerity and patent falsehood by bringing forward these same sacred books to justify it. Or they even quote from memory many things said in them which they imagine will provide them with valid evidence, not understanding either what they are saying, or the matters on which they are asserting themselves (1 Tm 1:7).

A couple paragraphs down there's a passage that's not quoted as often, but it's perhaps more important, focusing on the impact of pious foolishness on the wavering believer:

Some of the weaker brothers and sisters, however, are in danger of going astray more seriously when they hear these godless people holding forth expertly and fluently on the "music of the spheres," or on any questions you care to mention about the elements of this cosmos. They wilt and lose heart, putting these pundits before themselves, and while regarding them as great authorities, they turn back with a weary distaste to the books of salutary godliness, and can scarcely bring themselves to touch the volumes they should be devouring with delight—shrinking from the roughness of the husks of the wheat and eagerly eyeing the flowers of the thistles. After all, they have not time to be still (Ps 46:11), and to see how sweet is the Lord (Ps 34:8), nor are they hungry on the sabbath(Mt 12:1); and that is why they are too lazy to use the authority they have received from the Lord to pluck the ears of wheat and go on rubbing them in their hands until they come to what they can eat."

There you have it, straight from the Doctor of the Church's mouth: "creation science" diminishes the gospel and makes believers into atheists (or at least pagans).

June 28, 2007

Also in the September Analog, columnist Jeffery D. Kooistra weighs in on the issues raised by Michael Flynn's story "Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo" and its accompanying essay on medieval science (recently discussed here). By way of a spiritual and scientific autobiography, Kooistra emphasizes more explicitly the non-opposition of scientific practice and religious belief. He closes the article with a great quote from John Calvin's commentary on Genesis 1:16:

I have said, that Moses does not here subtilely descant, as a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words... Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons, that the star of Saturn, which, on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference: Moses wrote in the popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.

May 20, 2007

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Gottlieb writes an excellent essay on modern atheism. In one particularly interesting passage, he calls into question the value of poll results about religion:

Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them. Thus sociologists estimate that maybe only half of the Americans who say that they regularly attend church actually do so. The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth’s population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don’t know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a “spirit or life force,” belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest.

In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps. He also worries about a poll that said that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels—by which, to judge from blogs and online forums on the subject, some of them may have meant streaks of luck, or their own delightful infants.

To this I would add the fact that even those polls that use more specific terminology can be problematic. What exactly is a "personal God"? Do all respondents think of it in the same way? And is belief in one mutually exclusive from belief in a "spirit or life-force"? There's a lot of theological variety out there, and three-word poll questions don't do it justice.

Anyway, of real interest on the SF front is a passage further down on Kingsley Amis' alternate history novel The Alteration:

The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them. One of Kingsley Amis’s lesser-known novels, “The Alteration,” tried to envisage an alternative course for modern history in which the Reformation never happened, science is a dirty word, and in 1976 most of the planet is ruled by a Machiavellian Pope from Yorkshire. In this world, Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit and the central mosaic in Britain’s main cathedral is by David Hockney. That piece of fancy is dizzying enough on its own. But imagine attempting such a thought experiment in the contrary fashion, and rolling it back several thousand years to reveal a world with no churches, mosques, or temples. The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.

I question Gottlieb's description of The Alteration as one of Amis' "lesser-known" novels—it won the John W. Campbell Award, appears on David Pringle's list of the 100 Best Science Fiction Novels, and was canonized in Carroll and Graf's "Masters of Science Fiction" series alongside works by Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon. In SF circles, it may well be his best-known book. But this is a very, very minor quibble in an excellent article.

March 06, 2007

There's some interesting and intelligent theistic discussion of atheism going on right now. First up, there's Bede's review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which does what Dawkins is unwilling to: consider the opposing side's argument seriously rather than dismiss it out of hand. When it comes to the meat of the matter, Bede sums up Dawkins' central argument agains the existence of God:

"He claims that a God who could create a universe must be much more complicated than the universe is. Complex beings can only appear through evolution so for a God to pop into existence without a cause is vanishingly unlikely. It is impossible to overstate how bad this argument is and yet Dawkins is extremely proud of it. He is like a small child who has just created a mud pie and expects bounteous praise for his artistic genius."

My first thought on reading this is that Dawkins is crying out to be debunked via the ontological argument; the God he's saying he doesn't believe in doesn't seem to be the God that, well, anybody actually believes in. (Certainly not Thomas Aquinas, who makes it quite clear that God is the least complex thing possible.) And sure enough, ontological arguer Alvin Plantinga has done just that (among other things) in "The Dawkins Confusion," a similarly-intelligent-and-in-depth review in Christianity Today.

When you're done with that, check out A Thinking Reed's spiritual autobiography, "Up From Atheism," which bears more than a few resemblances to my own aspiritual-to-spiritual history. After reading about Dawkins' frustrating unwillingness to actually argue his point, it was quite refreshing to read the story of someone who came to their faith by intellectually rigorous means.

October 25, 2006

Wired has a fascinating cover story this month by Gary Wolf called “The Church of the Non-Believers.” It’s an overview of what Wolf calls the New Atheism, the fundamentalist, evangelical nonbelief of philosophers and scientists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. For a week or two now, I’ve been planning to write something about how the intelligent design movement has hijacked interesting theology and turned it into bad science. The Wired article has spurred me to write a different post entirely, this one on how atheists like Dawkins have hijacked interesting science and turned it into bad philosophy.

Well, for one, they both want you to believe that science and religion are inevitably at loggerheads, that the belief in God by necessity leads to creationism, just as the belief in evolution leads to atheism. Both seem to believe that there is only one way to believe. There’s a basic assumption here: the God that Dawkins does not believe in is Pat Robertson’s God, but, like Robertson, he doesn’t think that there’s any other way in which to believe. For most of the article, Wolf is making the same assumption—that the “belief” that atheists reject is the belief in Uncle God who wants to make you rich, and give you a gnarly time while doing it. (Indeed, it’s nearly the end of the article before Wolf even mentions any definitions of God that fall outside this caricature.) Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “Why I am not a Christian” makes more or less the same argument, rejecting belief in “a big brother who will look after you.”

And while that’s certainly where much of America’s loudest religious thought is now directed, it’s bad theology, and it’s wrong to paint all belief with that brush. Far preferable to me and, I would argue, most Christians throughout history, is Anselm’s definition of God as “that than which a greater cannot be conceived.” This is a far more interesting definition, more theologically sound, more spiritually rewarding (especially when combined with scientific discoveries in astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and, yes, evolution), and empirically non-falsifiable. Despite Russell, Dawkins, and Robinson’s insistence, God is not an old man who sits on a cloud smiting the wicked. God is a category of being that encompasses all of reality—good luck finding empirical proof either for or against that.

This is a basic problem with creationism and the intelligent design movement as well—they want God to be something that can be detected and proven with science. In a really, really good theology class I took at Harvard with Philip Clayton (who gets a name-check toward the end of Wolf’s article, when he finally gets around to talking about different definitions of God), I learned about a little theological conundrum called “the God of the gaps.” Basically, if you propose God as the answer to all the questions we don’t have answers for, then science will inevitably fill in those gaps, and the province of God will get smaller and smaller. ID theorists fall straight into this trap, even exacerbating the problem by trying to re-create gaps that have already been filled. But the basic problem is that they’re forgetting Anselm’s definition. God is that than which a great cannot be conceived. Wouldn’t a being like that be able to do better than straight-up evolutionary miracles?

Anyway, from this false definition of God, Dawkins concludes that religion is a cultural tumor that must be excised. In Wolf’s words:

Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

This particular statement reminded me more than a little of Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s novel Heaven, in which the entire known galaxy is controlled by the Church of Cosmic Unity, who preach tolerance for all beings and all beliefs. (Notably, their system of belief is called the Memeplex, after Dawkins’ own idea of self-replicating ideas.) So firmly do they believe in their message of tolerance, in fact, that they completely obliterate any species that refuses to accept their gospel. I’m not trying to suggest that Dawkins would go to such extremes, but it’s worth noting that the intolerant organization at this novel’s core uses the language of both faith and reason.

Of course, Dawkins doesn’t preach tolerance (and I agree with Wolf that “preach” is the right word here—in fact, the entire article is peppered with religious terminology applied to atheism). And that’s the basic problem with much atheism, both as I see it described in this article and as it was when I practiced it in high school. For all that Dawkins seems to have thought about faith, he doesn’t seem to have thought too much about the content of faith, relying instead on presuppositions and prejudices created by—well, Pat Robertson, for one, and Bertrand Russell too. That reference to Philip Clayton in Wolf’s article I mentioned? It’s immediately followed by a quote from Dawkins in which he describes the entire discipline of theology as “a nonsubject… Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content.” He rejects it out of hand, prejudicially, simply because of what it is. That statement makes me wonder: is this atheism a considered standpoint, or knee-jerk contrarianism?

I get my answer, I think, from the article’s sidebar on Penn and Teller, who, I learn, have been increasingly adding stage banter about their atheism. Penn, apparently, has registered vanity plates reading ATHEIST and GODLESS, and has been known to sign autographs with “There is no God.” While reading the sidebar, I couldn’t help but think: is Penn Jillette the atheist Steven Baldwin?

And with that I had my answer. Atheism, or at least the evangelical atheism of Dawkins, Russell, Penn, and Teller, is every bit the intolerant bad guy that Christian fundamentalism is. They're fixing to fight, and the rest of us are caught in the middle.